Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect the Pacific Coast

You could watch this excellent 16 minute doc from Damien Gillis just for the beauty alone.

It is BC's bad luck to lie between the bitumen of the Alberta tar sands and its final destination in China and the US. It is especially bad luck for the coastal peoples and the Great Bear Rainforest :

"The plan is to pump over half a million barrels a day of unrefined bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands over the Rockies, through the heartland of BC - crossing a thousand rivers and streams in the process - to the Port of Kitimat in the Great Bear Rainforest. From there, supertankers would ply the rough and dangerous waters of the BC coast en route to Asia and the United States. Dubbed the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the project is of concern for three main reasons:
1. It would facilitate the expansion of the Tar Sands, hooking emerging Asian
economies on the world's dirtiest oil;

2. the risk of leaks from the pipeline itself;

3. the danger of introducing oil supertankers for the first time to this part of the BC coast."

More at Pacific Wild. Pass it on.

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Long John Flaherty's Talk Like a Prat Day

Long John Jim Flaherty's speech to the Canadian Club last week might well read like he was running for student council at Garden Gnome High, but at least he has finally nailed down that whole four legs good, two legs bad, one peg leg argument about coalitions :

In the global recession, the ship of state has had a difficult voyage.
But we can see the harbour lights.
And that’s just when a would-be captain and his ragtag crew are trying to storm the bridge.
If they seize the wheel, ladies and gentlemen, they’ll have us on the rocks.

Oh noes, pirate parties!

Flaherty, the Finance Minister of Canada, managed to fit the word 'coalition' 13 times into a speech in which the word 'economy' rated a mere 8. So are we in election mode? Fuck, no :

"The coalition led by Mr. Ignatieff has its own agenda – power, power, power.
Under an Ignatieff-NDP-Bloc Québécois government, nothing would be safe."

Sorry, wrong clip ... I scrolled too far ahead... ah, here we go :

"...there is, I regret to say, a political risk.
That is the risk of an unnecessary election, an election that would jeopardize our economic recovery, just as we enter the home stretch.
Canadians don’t want an election. Our government isn’t seeking one.
Ladies and gentlemen, an unnecessary election would put all of this at risk."

"Unnecessary election"?
Weren't you the same guys who already gave us an "unnecessary election" in 2008 because you had no freakin clue how to work with the other parties and you were hoping for a majority which would mean you wouldn't have to?

Canadians are tired of political instability.
They are tired of elections every two years.

Yeah, got it. You've said that twice now

And they know we need a stable government, to ensure our economic recovery and long-term growth.
There is going to be an election, sooner or later.
The coalition may make it sooner.
Regardless, when it comes, Canadians will face a stark choice.
The outcome will be a majority government, one way or another.
A stable, national majority under Stephen Harper’s leadership.
Or the reckless coalition of Michael Ignatieff, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois.

Ok, forget the pirate thing. We've apparently metaphored into stables now. Stygian stables of steaming floor to ceiling horseshit.
"A stable national majority" under Steve the Unsteady?
The guy who rolls out of bed in the morning, spins the agenda wheel, and decides to axe anything with the word 'long' in it? Long form census one day; long gun registry the next.
Steve the Economist who pissed away a $13-billion dollar surplus in favour of a $40-billion deficit, who has the fucking gall to go on about our fragile economy while blowing $1.2 billion on summit security, and who padlocked the doors of Parliament twice in thirteen months rather than deal with living in a stable democracy.

You're not getting your Stygian stable majority, Steve, because even in a minority government you behave ridiculously like Darth Vader in the Deathstar cantine ordering up prorogies when you don't get your way.
You should have learned this from your last "unnecessary election".
Stability will only come from you learning to work nicely with the other elected , uh, pirates.
And that's why we keep giving them, not you, a stable majority of Canadian votes.
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Perpetual prison for protesters

Update : Betty's response below

An editorial in the National Post two days ago compared the peaceful civil disobedience and incarceration of 82 year old environmental activist Betty Krawczyk with that of 62 year old anti-abortion protester Linda Gibbons :

Two court injunctions; two women who violated them in a way that significantly harmed no one; prison time for both that would come as a shock to some violent offenders.

In it Chris Selley suggests that the "outraged supporters on both sides" should "consider joining forces" to look "the ferocious power of the state straight in the eyes" because "true civil libertarians must stand up for people they don’t like for the greater good".

In quoting from my blogpost on Betty K's Sept 22 hearing, Mr. Selley says he suspects that I would "decline the opportunity" to similarly defend Ms. Gibbons. I'm not convinced she requires further defence from me, given she has already recently received two stirring ones in The Sun and NaPo, further linked to by Selley in his weekly roundup, while the MSM has entirely ignored Betty this time round.

Selley on both protesters : "Not caring is pretty much where I’m at, incidentally."

Let me see if I can awaken those libertarian sensibilities of yours, Mr. Selley, in the one case here with which I am more familiar.

You wrote : "I happen to think court orders should be obeyed, and that those who defy court orders should be punished."

You probably already know Betty strongly agrees with you on both those points, but what has driven an otherwise law-abiding citizen to resort to defying that sensibility?

The government hires a corporation to clear publicly owned land. Members of the public protest. The corporation, on behalf of the government, gets a court order to prevent the public from making further protests and then the government arrests those who disobey it. The public's beef is actually with the government defiling public lands and not with the hired corporation, but the courts collude with the government in a SLAPP suit that leaves the public no legal recourse against the government. It's a built-in fail.


Are you quite sure you don't care about this, Mr. Selley?


In forwarding Selley's NaPo piece to me, Cliff at Rusty Idols said : "The point that all Canadians right, left and center have much to fear from the precedent of perpetual imprisonment for protesting is essentially true."

Yes it is.

Update : This blogpost was cross-posted at Back of the Book, where Betty left the following response :

Very good article. I am often compared to, or lumped in with, the anti-choice people but I am decidedly pro-choice. They are free to protest as they please, just as I am, but I am fundamentally opposed to their philosophy.
This attitude that women shouldn’t have control over anything, even their own bodies, is one reason, a big reason, in my opinion, that the world is in such a mess.

And of course it is about religious dogma that underlies the anti-choice people’s fervor that makes them so concerned about a fertilized egg and so uncaring of women. And this uncaring attitude about women slops over into being uncaring about the environment, because after all, they don’t really regard this earth as their home.
Thanks for caring.

Betty Krawczyk.

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Combating Terrorism Act passes 2nd reading

On the same day the nation was preoccupied with the national Con/Lib competition for votes to kill/preserve the long gun registry, the Libs and Cons got together to slip the Combating Terrorism Act through second reading in the House - 220 votes to 84 in a classic Con/Lib vs NDP/Bloc split -just ten minutes before the long gun vote.

The Libs and Cons may disagree on whether it is either useful or an egregious invasion of privacy and civil liberties that Canadians should have to spend a few minutes registering a long gun online, but when it comes to locking Canadians up for 12 months without a warrant or compelling them to appear before a court based on some anonymous tip, they're both just fine with that.

The right to remain silent, the right not to be jailed without charge, the right to know what the charges are against you - pfft!

In reintroducing Bill C-17 for the third time on Monday - to reinstate provisions from the Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 - Justice Minister Rob Nicholson emphasized a fabulous new feature:

"The key here is that the person required to attend an investigative hearing is treated as a witness, not someone who is accused of a crime."

True, as long as your definition of "witness" includes being arrested if you don't comply and being detained for 72 hours if you do.

But what if you are also suspected of being likely to commit a terrorist crime some time in the future. Well, then :

"a judge can order the person's detention for up to 12 months."

But no worries. A brand new civil rights safety provision in this regurgitated version of 9/11 law stipulates that every 12 months the Attorney General and the Public Safety Minister - that would be Nicholson himself and Vic lock-'em-up Toews respectively - must "provide their opinions, supported by reasons, as to whether the operations of these provisions should be extended."

Liberal critic for Public Safety & National Security Mark Holland made some noises about balancing national security with individual liberty and how :

"the government has completely ignored most of the key recommendations that came from Justice O'Connor [re Maher Arar], which were supported by Justice Iacobucci and were repeated by the RCMP Public Complaints Commissioner Paul Kennedy"

but then two days later, he voted for it along with the rest of the Libs.

There were hours and hours of speeches in the House this Monday and Tuesday :

Lib Marlene Jennings said right off the bat on Monday that the Libs would be voting for C-17 to proceed to committee.

NDP Joe Comartin noted "there is no crime related to terrorism not already included in the Criminal Code."

Bloc Maria Mourani : Arar. CSIS supports info gained via torture. Why would we give them even more secret powers?

NDP Wayne Marston worried we were regressing to pre Magna Carta sensibilities.

Con Colin Carrie accused "the coalition" of being "soft on terror".

Bloc Serge Ménard noted that under the War Measures Act "almost all candidates who ran against Mayor Drapeau [in the Montreal elections] were incarcerated. A law which goes so far as to incarcerate political opponents has already been used once in our history," he said.

NDP Don Davies brought up the "preventative arrest of 1,100 Canadians arrested at G20 for simply walking in the street" and asked why a government so against turning people into criminals for refusing to answer the long form census was at the same time happy to lock people up for refusing to answer questions based merely on suspicions?

Lib Derek Lee said Canadians already don't have the legal right to remain silent. (he's wrong about that.)

NDP Bill Siksay noted that security certificates were intended to expedite deportation of non-citizens yet they have been used instead to jail people for up to eight years without a trial. Slippery slope.


As I said - hours and hours of debate.
But then NDP Libby Davies wondered why there were hundreds of pages in newspapers across the country dealing with the gun registry but not one mention of the debate on the Combating Terrorism Act.

Good question, Libby.
The papers were full of the return of the House and Slagging Period, in which C-17 was not mentioned, yet whenever the Cons and Libs get together to pass something really draconian, like the Canada Colombia FTA or this Bill C-17, suddenly the media loses all interest.

Here's another question. After much initial fanfare about how important this bill is in the fight against 'terrists', and with the Libs onside since June 2009, the Cons have allowed it to languish in limbo for the last 15 months. Now it's the first government order to be put before the House this week. Why is that?
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Harper packs 'em in at the UN

Correction : Apparently Steve's speech was scheduled during quiet time at the UN.

The trolls over at Susan Delacourt's are claiming the photos reveal liberal media bias.

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Betty Krawczyk's Sept 22 hearing

See update to post below.

I am so not a lawyer but if you have any questions about yesterday's hearing, leave them under that post and I'll try to answer them as best I can and then maybe people with a better grasp of law will come along and fix them up.

Life sentence for Betty Krawczyk? Really?

updated below : Betty's Sept 22 hearing

Something has gone terribly wrong here.

Betty Krawczyk was 65 years old when she went to jail for Clayoquot Sound. It was her first ever time in prison.

She went to jail again at age 78 for standing in front of bulldozers in 2006 to protest the building of the Sea-to-Sky Highway through the Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics.

"There will be no logging here today," she said.

That time a court injunction also specified that she stay away from the bluffs. She didn't stay away and back into prison she went for another 10 months, this time for disobeying the court.

Somehow, instead of receiving the Order of Canada for her courage, Betty is now up to eight prison sentences - eight! - without this environmental hero and grandmother of eight having ever harmed a single person or piece of logging or construction equipment.
She shows up, she stands up for her beliefs, she gets arrested.

Her real crime in the eyes of the courts is that she challenges the legitimacy of the judicial system to criminalize dissent, to punish protesting :

"I won’t do community service should that be part of my sentence. I have done community service all of my life and I have done it for love. I refuse to have community service imposed on me as a punishment. And I won’t pay a fine or allow anyone else to pay a fine for me. I won’t accept any part of electronic monitoring as I would consider that an enforced internalization of a guilt I don’t feel and don’t accept and I refuse to internalize this court’s opinion of me by policing myself."

Back to jail for Betty K.
After serving out her last sentence in full, Betty appealed it on the grounds that the squelching of protest inconvenient to corporations and governments is an illegitimate use of the legal system.

The Attorney General's response to her appeal has been to cite a case ruling for chronic offenders, recommend the court re-sentence her under the rules of "accumulated convictions", and lock her up for life?

"When an accused has been convicted of a serious crime in itself calling for a substantial sentence and when he suffers from some mental or personalty disorder rendering him a danger to the community but not subjecting him to confinement in a mental institution and when it is uncertain when, if ever, the accused will be cured of his affliction, in my opinion the appropriate sentence is one of life."

"A serious crime"? "A mental or personality disorder"? "A danger to the community"?
"Life" ? For an appeal to a sentence she has already served?
Good God.
Shame on you, Michael Brundrett of the Attorney Generals Office.

It was extraordinary enough that a provincial government now happy to take credit for having "saved" Clayoquot Sound was willing to jail for two and a half years a person prominently responsible for having forced them to do so. It is beyond heinous that they should now attempt to rebrand her fight for social justice and responsible environmental practices some sort of "mental disorder" worthy of a life sentence.

Betty's appeal will be heard this Wednesday Sept 22nd at 10am at the Court House, 800 Smithe St., Vancouver. She is asking for your support at a rally at 9:30am on the back steps of the Court House at Howe and Robson just before the hearing.

Please come. If you can't, write or email a letter to your local paper, your MLA.
Anything will do - the important thing is to let them know you are watching.

Betty is willing to go to prison for her beliefs; please take a few moments to write a letter to stand up for yours.

Thank you.
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Update Tuesday Sept 21. Her hearing is tomorrow and still nothing on CBC or in the papers!
Are they going to wait until afterwards again?
Hey, peeps, sound the horns and make a stink out there!
Will update tomorrow after I get back from the hearing.
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Sept. 22. 8pm. Hi again.
The good news at Betty's hearing today was that Crown lawyer Brundrett said he is not seeking any increase to her already served 10 month sentence and was merely using the comparison to the 15 and 25 year sentencing of the two pedophile cases he cited to justify the "scope of appropriate sentencing". Sure.

Speaking on her own behalf in court today, Betty took on the unfair use of civil courts to stifle dissent by imposing heavy sentences on peaceful protesters. In a trial by indictment, she would have had access to trial by jury and the Charter of Rights to fight the charges. Instead, Betty got a summary trial, a process peculiar to BC, in which the Crown can use civil court - no jury, no access to the Charter - to do an end run around the usual criminal process.

Consider. You object to the bulldozing of crown land by the government and stand in front of the bulldozer. The bulldozer company gets an injunction to prevent you from obstructing their work.
The next time you stand in front of the bulldozer you are now automatically in contempt of court. Did you disobey the court order to desist? Yes, you did. Guilty. And every time you protest, the length of sentence goes up as the court protects its right to find you in contempt. You appeal your conviction to the Supreme Court but they decline to take the case. So back you go to the BC Court of Appeal to protest your sentence, the only legal avenue left open to you, but now you are operating under rules that only allow you to address the fairness of your sentence, not your original reasons for protesting in the first place.
At no point along the course of this legal nickel and diming did you get to defend your actions on behalf of the environment. Neat trick, eh?

This is exactly what happened to Betty, starting with her arrest at the bulldozing of West Vancouver’s Eagleridge Bluffs for the 2010 Winter Olympics..

Betty's considerable respect for the law and her expectation of the inevitability of serving time for contempt of court is not at issue, as she has said herself repeatedly.
Instead, what she is shining a light on here is a legal chill process which prevents peaceful protesters from getting a fair hearing for the original reasons for their protest.

Damn fine thing to hear an 82 year old great grandmother take this one on.
After Betty and Crown lawyer Brundrett made their submissions, the day ended without resolution and we have to wait for the next as yet unannounced court date to hear the judge's ruling. I am not hopeful that the Appeals Court is either willing or able to address the larger issue of legal chill for protesters that Betty wants to see resolved.
To be continued ....

Great job on this issue today on CBC's The Current, with Anna Maria Tremonti.

ETA : Today's rally outside the courthouse was dedicated to the memory of elder Harriet Nahanee (1935 - 2007), who died after being incarcerated for her protest at the Eagleridge Bluffs. Nahanee also refused to apologize for her "contempt". So should we all.
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While Steve clears some more brush at his ranch ...

... over at Maclean's it is being remarked that Stephen Harper is actually one of those "Toronto elites" John Baird has been slagging lately :

Richview Collegiate Institute : "Richview is well-known across Etobicoke for having a primarily upper class population..."

So naturally someone mentioned in the comments that Steve is writing a book and next up is ...

Holly Stick : Working title "Mein Puck".

LOLZ. Thank you, Holly.

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US senators visit their Defense Dept jet fuel in Alberta

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach will be taking a tour of the tar sands today with three American senators, all members of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

So while the good senators might be looking at this :

they will be seeing this :

That fuzzy bit in the red portion that takes up well over half the US Department of Defense Energy Consumption pie chart says : "Jet Fuel".

Tar Sands Watch :

The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s leading consumer of petroleum, sucking up about 340,000 barrels of oil every day, more than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.
The Pentagon is the single largest institutional buyer of oil in the world, consuming an estimated 85 percent of the U.S. Government’s use of oil.

Canada is the largest supplier of oil and refined products to the US at over 2 million barrels a day, nearly half of which comes from the tarsands.

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Stelmach has been busy lately with his advertising campaign to persuade the world that Alberta's oilsands are clean and secure.

Here's a jingle suggestion for you, Ed : "Supplying jet fuel to the US military to bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq - it's what we do best."

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Last night future Sun TV luminary Ezra Levant was on Alberta Prime Time touting his book "Ethical Oil", in which he argues that the oilsands are a superior ethical choice to using oil from human rights violating countries. The other guest was the remarkably unflappable Mike Hudema from Greenpeace who wasn't buying Ezra's bizarre moral equivalency.

It needn't be a false choice between two bad options, said Mike, at which point Ezra, who had introduced the country comparisons in the first place, accused Mike of equating Canada with Sudan.

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Apparently undeterred at the prospect of being sued for libel by George Soros for misrepresenting Soros' Holocaust childhood to score points for Sun TV/Fox News North in his Sun editorial "George Schwartz, the Jewish Nazi", here is some of Ezrant's response to Mike last night :

"Goddamn coward ... you're a liar, a disgusting man ... bullshitter ... a con man ... a crook ... you little coward ... you bastard."

You can watch it here if you must. Personally I can hardly wait for further arguments in support of the superior ethics of the tarsands from Ezra when Fox News North hits the airwaves.

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Cons : long on guns, short on memory

ConMP Candice Hoeppner, Tony Bernardo, and Con MP Garry Breikreuz at the CSSA Blast in Calgary on April 2-3, 2010

CBC : NRA involved in gun registry debate :

Bernardo, a frequent guest on NRA chat shows updating U.S. gun owners on the fight to kill the Canadian registry, said the NRA was instrumental in helping him set up his Canadian lobby group, CILA, the lobbying arm of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA), and a mirror group of the Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA's lobbying arm.

Bernardo : "We have been working hand in hand with the NRA regarding international issues for the past three and a half years."

"The NRA’s Canadian Situation Infommercial ... was entirely set up by CILA. Its production cost was over $100,000 and was entirely paid for by the NRA."

CSSA media release, June 8, 2010 :
Team CSSA welcomes former Breitkreuz staffer as new Communications Director :

"While Brant was working with [Con MP] Garry Breitkreuz, he acted as liaison with the CSSA on a variety of gun-related issues, including the long-gun registry. The CSSA worked with the MP's office on Bill C-301 and later Bill C-391," explains Bernardo."

Manitoba Con MP Candice Hoeppner, sponsor of Bill C-391 to kill the long gun registry, Sept 14, 2010 :

"I’ve never spoken, e-mailed, had any contact. I don’t know anyone at the NRA."

Okey dokey then.
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